Gregory's Server
But here's the thing: science has no external social planner.
Scientists themselves determine what results are considered worthwhile, and how worthwhile. They decide who is hired, promoted, given wages, is awarded prizes, and garners esteem. In other words, they set their own wages, of course subject to a budget constraint.
What we prove in this paper is that (in a simple model of the scientific enterprise), when left to their own devices scientists will choose for themselves a wage scheme that results in below-optimal risk-taking.
This is an inevitable consequence of the unobservability of effort and risk, coupled with the lack of an external social planner.
In other words, the rewards the science collective offers are not sufficient to motivating socially optimal levels of scientific risk.